On Doing the Best You Can

Existence is imperfect, and you can't always get what you want or think you deserve. However, that doesn't mean you can't try to be the best you can in whatever field you work in, regardless of the end goal. Even if you fail, it doesn't mean you didn't try your best—although in most cases, there is room for improvement.

The contemporary world is very competitive, as companies try to pick the best of the best from all of the candidates who come to interview. Make one mistake, and you're one step closer to losing the position.

Most people have two choices: improve their presentation skills or go home and live off someone else's income, such as a parent, partner, or other relative. Since my country recognizes disabilities as a serious obstacle to employment, they gave me a third option: live off disability benefits and only find work if necessary to pay the bills, if the benefits are insufficient.

Technically, I never worked full-time because such a trial would only worsen my mental health. Before I started this website, I worked as a volunteer in National Service, but I eventually had to stop because it was too hard for me. There wasn't anything difficult about the job, other than the fact that it was extremely monotonous and made me realize that I suffer from extreme periods of exhaustion if I am mentally provoked.

Because of that experience, I created this website in order to still give something to others, without being a total leech. Stress causes me not only exhaustion, but physical pain as well, so there is a limit to what I can do even in the field of philosophical writing.

That's what brings me back to the original premise of this article: doing your best doesn't always mean being perfect or even ideal. A person in a wheelchair won't do well when tasked with climbing stairs, and a blind man won't necessarily navigate a new location as well as a seeing man. In other words, doing your best is about capacity, not merit.

The reason for that is that even if you are a skilled individual, you still have your limits. The irony is that a person with greater capacity than you, but less merit, might be able to do better than you because their skill might improve greatly over time, while performing the same specific tasks.

To better illustrate this, let's take gaming. The fact that two players have the same amount of experience in a game doesn't mean they have the same competence. That is because one of them might have developed greater proficiency than their counterpart. Therefore, judging someone's skill completely based on their experience is technically a fallacy, as experience alone is insufficient. It's like life itself, with the belief that the elderly are wise, which is a generalization based on age.

You won't see me writing academic articles. The work is too much for me, not because I'm lazy, but because it's too exhausting and it causes me stress, which leads to the aforementioned physical pain. I'm sorry to say this, but if you're interested in knowing more about the points I'm making, you can search other sources as well, as the internet is as available to you as it is to me. I wish I had the greater capacity to perform more extensive research, but it is too tiring, so I am confined to simply writing contemplations and assessments based on my insight.

Rest assured, however, that I am trying my best as a writer and as a site owner. For those of you who are more experienced Philosocom users, this site has gone through countless changes, and they were all made by me.

I have weekly appointments with a business consultant who gives me tasks to perform. She has said that website managing is practically an endless flow of work. There is always something to change, both in terms of design and interface. Indeed, I have learned a lot since I decided to create a website for my content.

To sum it all up, even doing your best is not always enough. But this does not always have to be an insult. It is simply that you cannot always reach perfection, and some other people might do it better than you, not necessarily because you are incompetent, but because humans have different capacities that cannot always be altered. If you have been dealt an excellent hand, make the most of it. If you have been dealt an unfortunate hand, make the most of it. Either way, striving for the moon can still place you among the stars.